


All Beings Great and Small

by escribo



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Hand Jobs, M/M, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-09
Updated: 2017-07-09
Packaged: 2018-11-29 16:33:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11444736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/escribo/pseuds/escribo
Summary: I always feel very patriotic after OR. My whites are covered with red and it gives me the blues.--Hawkeye Pierce





	All Beings Great and Small

**Author's Note:**

> For the two line challenge. Lyric: _please baby can't you see/my mind's a burnin' hell_ \-- **melissa etheridge, i'm the only one**

At the first call of choppers on his first day in Korea, Hawkeye had begun to question his very existence on this planet. He can't quite accept that he's been placed upon this earth to knit soldiers back together so that they could die later in a more spectacular fashion. After all, he can still vaguely remember the plans he had made for after medical school--can almost see the logic and beauty in them--in this mythical thing called _future_.

He contemplates this sometimes as he watches arteries pump blood around a soldier's heart, as his scalpel makes precise and minute incisions to the pericardial wall. What kind of plans and dreams some of these boys must have had. He can imagine them sitting in a dark movie theatre, hand creeping beneath the sweater of some pretty girl towards what surely must have seemed like paradise. Dying in mud and filth probably hadn't even rated in their top ten worries. A 98% survival rate is small comfort when Hawkeye knows all too well that none of them--patient or doctor--will ever regain any sense of peace of mind.

It wears on a man.

It's twelve hours later, and he's covered in blood--none of it his own, for which he gives silent thanks. He takes small comforts like that, holds them close and breathes them in. The moon is high and full in the sky and Trapper walks along beside him, making a halfhearted pass at a nurse. Hawkeye is too tired to even try. He's not even sure all his parts are in working order, but not testing it--not finding out for sure--is a bit of a comfort, too. 

But walking into the darkened Swamp with Trapper and noting Frank's empty bed, the fire kind of goes out of his carefully constructed sanity. That Frank gets to curl up with a warm body, granted it's Major Houlihan, but still a warm, soft body of the female persuasion. Suddenly the thought of waiting until Trapper falls asleep so that Hawkeye can slip his hand into his pajama bottoms seems like one injustice too many in a world full of injustices.

"Don't suppose you have any of those candied plums you got in Seoul left?"

Trapper's voice invades Hawkeye's thoughts, making him feel rather like a bird has landed on his shoulder and is pecking away at his head. He collapses onto his cot, too tired to change or trudge off to the showers. He considers that he could probably spend the rest of the war just here. Just shut it all down. "My mind's a burning hell, Trap. Can't you feel it, too? Maybe not. Maybe none of us can actually feel anything anymore."

"Feeling is overrated. I learned that one the first day of my marriage. What you need is a drink." 

Hawkeye can hear Trapper moving about in the dark not bothering with the light. Hawkeye's smile stretches his lips flat, comforted again. He tries not to think about what would have happened to him had he been here alone--worse than alone, existing in a camp full of Frank Burnses. The thought is nearly as numbing as hours of meatball surgery.

"A wee dram. Mother's milk, as it were."

"Precisely what this day needs. Make mine dry. Arid. The Gretchen Linn of Martini's."

"Whose Gretchen Linn?"

Hawkeye can nearly hear the leer in Trapper's voice, and finds it oddly soothing. "Gretchen Linn. The librarian at my medical school. A woman so caustic, so impoverished of joy that she left a trail of dust when she moved."

"Sounds like a keeper."

As Trapper mixes the drinks, Hawkeye focuses on the sounds of liquid in a glass, the swirl of a swizzle stick. Pouring. He decides he likes _pouring_ the best. The cot dips and he reaches up to take the martini glass. "To Miss Linn.

"Miss Linn."

_Mother's milk_ indeed. Hawkeye can feel himself melting into the cot, his spine turning liquid and the warmth spreading from his lips down his body to where the side of his thigh is pressed tight against Trapper's back . He remembers learning anatomy this way ( _from tongue to pharynx, esophagus to stomach_ ) and how the hand works ( _the adductor pollicis stabilizes objects, like this glass, against the palm and the hand's position is static_ ). The heat pools in his extremities, of course. Of course. He's a man and that's where the blood of men is stored when not in use. 

The slam of the Swamp's door as Frank comes in and Trapper's voice jars him from this contemplation of blood and heat. They all blink furiously against the light as Frank pulls the overhead bulb's cord. He's searching for something, Frank is, but Hawkeye is focused on the way the string attached to the light bounces around.

"Hiya Chuckles," Trapper says, always willing to poke about to see what will fall out.

"I don't have to take that."

Trapper looks at Hawkeye, the familiar, conspiratorial grin on his face. "Take what, Frank?"

"You know. You." Frank stops his search and stands in the middle of the room, stymied to think of a good comeback. Reaching out, he snatches his bible from the shelf above his bed. "You guys."

"You you guys, Frank?"

A huff is the only answer and the door is banging shut again. Trapper stands to pull the cord once more, wrapping them in darkness again before he sits back down. He laughs to himself, the reason for it probably already gone from his thoughts. 

Hawkeye reaches out and rests his hand on Trapper's back, needing to touch something--someone--waiting for his eyes to adjust again. The dark feels more encompassing now, hell licking around his edges. He talks just to hear a voice. "Do you ever wonder, Trap. Do you ever wake up in the night and wonder if this is it? If the whole world has maybe condensed to this--to Korea--and there isn't anything else to go back to. That all the things that I think about to keep myself sane--Maine, lobster dinners, and Deborah Kerr in a sweater. My dad. What if it's all been made up by the war department?"

"They're real, Hawk."

"What if my life is nothing more than a movie spliced together by some corporal sitting in a propaganda office in Tokyo. What if I'm not me but someone else playing me. What if I'm Gary Cooper and you're Henry Fonda starring in _This Might Have Been My Life_."

"Co-starring Maureen O'Hara as Hot Lips." Hawkeye can hear Trapper swallow back the rest of his drink then wipe his lips with the back of his hand. The glass is set aside. "One day we'll all go home and you'll be asking Maureen O'Hara if this was all a war movie made up by Hollywood."

"And then after she kicks me out, I'll go home to my empty little bed and jerk off until I fall asleep. Nothing will change. I'll never even know I was here."

"There you go. Just needed a positive spin on it." 

Hawkeye's laugh is humorless. Positive isn't something he would recognize anymore, he's sure. He would settle for about eight hours of sleep and a meal that didn't belong to the last war. Turning on his side, he curls his legs around Trapper's body, his own hands sliding between his thighs in a good imitation of the fetal position. It's only a few minutes of furiously swallowing against the lump in his throat before he feels Trapper's hand on his back rubbing in circles. Hawkeye quits the rocking motion he wasn't even aware he was making, stilling his entire body. 

Trapper is propping his body up over Hawkeye's, staring down at him. There's no leer or sarcasm left, none of the shields that Trapper uses as his own defense against the war. His face is open, relaxed in a way--sympathetic. The hand that had just been moving in slow circles across Hawkeye's shoulder blades has moved lower to the strings of Hawkeye's scrubs and then lower still against skin.

"This."

"What?"

"This." Hawkeye doesn't know if he's capable of more words, so he has to trust that Trapper will again know what he needs.

"It doesn't mean anything."

"I know."

"It's just a--" 

"--a--" 

"Just a thing."

"I know." 

There's more relief then, something physically more solid in its warmth and comfort. Hell beaten back for a moment, and some divine presence lifted back up into the shining light. Hawkeye gives a gasping laugh, chokes on a sob, and then suddenly elated that he still remembers how, laughs harder. It's only just a moment though in this night that seems to last forever. Only just a half second before Hawkeye shuts up, his hand hot and wet on his own cock, Trapper's over it--his fingers lining up with Hawkeye's. It's not like coming inside a girl. It doesn't even feel remotely sexual. It _feels_ and it's enough to be just that.

Lying back on the cot, hot and sweaty, listening as Trapper moves around the tent again, Hawkeye feels himself once more. The dip on the cot from Trapper's weight feels solid and steady, just like Trapper himself. The towel he uses to clean his hand and cock feels rough. In the darkness of the camp, Hawkeye can see shapes and hear other people moving around. It doesn't even feel like the end of the world when they hear Radar racing through camp, calling for the doctors and nurses under the cry of _Choppers_.


End file.
